Actor John Hamm joins Jemele to discuss his love of the late Lenny Bruce, his love for vintage posters and posters, and why he keeps a collection of Lenny's memorabilia at his office in Los Angeles. They also discuss what it's like to grow up in a family with an actor's brother and sister, and what it means to be a family man. And, of course, there's a lot of laughs along the way. It's a fun, light-hearted conversation that you don't want to miss. Guests: John Hamm and Jemele Rad! Thanks to our sponsor, Lanyadoo! Thanks also to our patron, for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Thank you, Jemele, for being a part of this podcast and for making it special. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! We'll be looking out for new episodes in the future! Subscribe, Like, and Share the podcast! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Music by Zapsplat Art by Jeff Kaale ( ) and Matt Knott ( ) Thank You for listening to Gimlet Media and The Nod ( ) for producing this episode? and Good Mythology Podcasts Subscribe to our new music by Bad Astronomy ( ) Subscribe on Podulium Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and much more! Enjoy this episode and share it on your podcast choices! Send us your thoughts on social media! and we'll be featured on the podcast next week on the next episode of That's next episode on Good Mythical Good Morning America? Subscribe and subscribe to our podcast? Good Luck, Good Luck Out There! by Good Morning Out There by Good Trouble by Good Success by Good Day Out There & Good Trouble Outtro Music by Bad Day Outlawz by on Podcasts Outtro by Good Workday by Mr. John Goodspeed Good Day by Good Hustler by , Good Day Dayday Out? by Sarah Goodspeed Outtropeep - Thank You'll Hear Me Outlaw Outtro Outtro & Good Day by Puff and Thank You Outlaw by John Rell by Johnny Goodday Outlaw X by Jack Williams And Much More! by Pizzi
00:01:06.000It's sort of like you're letting someone come in and wander.
00:01:11.000Some of the best museums in the world are people's individual curation.
00:01:14.000Some of the best art collections ever made are better than any museum because they're put together by someone and you're finding the threads and things.
00:01:21.000So I think when you can assemble things that have meant something to you but you can put them in a space where other people can bump into them, it's better than just...
00:01:31.000Than letting them just collect dust in your own home where you stop looking at them.
00:01:35.000You have a very unusual perspective for someone who makes a living as an actor.
00:02:16.000Not macho, but there's like, you know, men will look to play intense roles and these things.
00:02:21.000But what you're doing is like, it's, you're playing dress up.
00:02:26.000Like, you know, you're like, and I always liked, I always liked the Dorothy Parker, the famous New York, you know, writer said, scratch an actor, you'll find an actress.
00:02:48.000But that's the real truth of the whole thing, is like, we put on makeup, we put on clothes, we play dress up, and we pretend to be other people.
00:02:59.000You know, when people are like, you know, sometimes my brother and sister will laugh because I've done these certain things that have a certain kind of iconic intensity or whatever, right?
00:03:12.000And they look at me and they're like, are you kidding?
00:03:14.000Like, have you ever seen the size of his ankles?
00:03:16.000They're like, my brother's like, he's such a twerp.
00:04:42.000Through getting well-known, they're getting this chance to sort of wipe the slate of whatever it is they were getting away from, and they're getting the chance to sort of create a...
00:06:08.000And there are these people who come and they have – They have like a kind of a permanent – they're a permanent before and after in a certain kind of field, you know what I mean?
00:06:28.000Although it is interesting when you go back and look at rock in that era – There's that famous story of, I think, of, I don't remember if it's like Pete Townsend making Eric Clapton come with him to hear Hendrix and Clapton crying.
00:07:44.000I think Willie Nelson is legitimately, in country music, there's before and after Willie Nelson.
00:07:50.000And you can say that Hank Williams Jr. or whatever, but Willie Nelson to me is the hinge around which it goes from being something that had a Nashville Grand Ole Opry kind of polish to it,
00:08:07.000And he basically took it—he reclaimed it as this, like, American roots thing and put jazz in it.
00:08:16.000That's what's so crazy is anyone who plays music knows, like, Willie Nelson is essentially a jazz guitar player.
00:08:22.000Like, and he's—you know, Redheaded Stranger is—to me, that's a before and after kind of a thing, too.
00:08:30.000Like, there's that whole outlaw thing.
00:08:33.000And I think there's a whole lot of— It's almost like after that, there's two camps.
00:08:38.000There's still going to be the Steve Earle in his Copperhead Road thing, but then there's Steve Earle roots Steve Earle.
00:09:19.000They wanted to be – You know, intense.
00:09:25.000Like those were not the kind of words that people, when you think back on like Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, like that is not what movie stars were aspiring to.
00:09:36.000They were aspiring to polish, a kind of a polish.
00:09:43.000There's something to his performances where you go, oh, well, this is more like real life than on the waterfront.
00:09:50.000Like, the I could have been a contender thing.
00:09:53.000Like, when he's doing that, you're like, oh, this is how someone would actually behave if they felt like their life had been a disaster and it could have been avoided.
00:10:03.000Well, you just hit on something, though, that it drives me nuts because when people sort of talk about Brando, they're like, you know, they're sort of the, like, the Stanley Kowalski, the brutal masculinity, etc.
00:10:17.000The thing about Brando is he is beautiful.
00:10:20.000He's kind of this enormous Roman-looking guy.
00:11:32.000And if you watch actors before him, there was a certain undeniable theatric element to what they were doing that was like, oh, this guy's acting.
00:11:43.000Whereas he seemed like a guy who was really living the scene.
00:11:50.000And some of it – sometimes I think it sounds silly to say the instrument of a person, but he has this crazy – he looks the way he looks, but he's got this marble-mouthed – he's not articulate.
00:12:02.000He doesn't come off as – like there's a mushiness to the way he speaks and kind of a – Yeah, it doesn't have style.
00:12:14.000You know, the guys before that, you felt that they were working on their style.
00:12:20.000And he seemed to be sort of like scratching his ribs and mumbling and, you know, in a t-shirt.
00:12:31.000And he just was kind of present in the moment.
00:12:35.000I think it was all accentuated by the way he ended his life, like the end of his life.
00:12:48.000He just didn't seem to give a fuck about that at all.
00:12:52.000Yeah, I think he said something to me one time about how much he was enjoying his life when he was like 23. And he's like, you know, even when he was doing the play Streetcar that made him famous, he was telling me like he would get with his pal Diego and go up to Harlem,
00:13:07.000go to clubs and hit on girls and all these things.
00:13:11.000And I said, you weren't aware of what was going on, you know?
00:14:41.000Or the original Scorsese doc about him on No Direction Home.
00:14:45.000Here's this guy, he's in his early 20s, and they're coming at him with all this voice of your generation, all this stuff, and he's like, that's nothing I can relate to, man.
00:15:37.000Sensibility to go, everything you're bringing at me is going to be bad for me.
00:15:42.000If you watch those interviews with him when he's that age, it's pretty astonishing.
00:15:47.000Because to your point, you're like a thoughtful actor.
00:15:51.000I look at him and I'm like, nobody has that discipline at that age.
00:15:56.000Yeah, it's amazing how uniquely qualified he was for that position at that point in time and that very strange, tumultuous time in history as well.
00:16:04.000And not only that, right at the moment that Joni Baez brings him out on the stage at the Newport Folk Festival and basically goes, this is the prince.
00:16:22.000He doesn't even take one year to go, let me just lean into your love.
00:16:28.000The next year he comes with an electric guitar and plugs it in at the Newport Folk Festival and people start screaming in agony, like going, what are you doing?
00:16:38.000Like, you're Bob Dylan, you're the king of folk, you can't plug in a guitar.
00:16:41.000And people are like running to try to cut his cords with an axe in this thing.
00:17:15.000You're going to not like it because you like what I just did.
00:17:18.000Now where I'm going, you're going to be discombobulated and upset, and eventually you're going to catch up, and then when you catch up, I'm going to move on to something else.
00:17:26.000It really is amazing, because how many people do you know in any of the things we all do, Right.
00:19:06.000If you go see him, it's still hilarious, irreverent, just not...
00:19:15.000Well, let me ask you a question, because I think it's interesting.
00:19:18.000I think in that vein, like if you look at Howard Stern, who I've met only a couple times, but I found him to be like an extremely, extremely thoughtful guy.
00:20:42.000But watching it, to me, this idea that he's kind of said, hey, look, you know, I'm – I'm going to be honest about where I'm at and in some measure I'm going to say there's things I've done I regret.
00:20:55.000There's ways I've treated certain people in the interest of the show that I'm kind of done with that.
00:22:00.000There's an amazing thing going on in the world right now, which is people are reproving or reconnecting with the fact that for all of what goes on on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all this bullshit,
00:22:15.000the truth is people like and have the appetite for and their brains...
00:22:22.000Enjoy longer form conversations and longer form stories.
00:22:32.000And like popular culture feeds us a lot of like fast food and Xanax in like a speedball of you can't handle anything.
00:22:41.000You don't want anything more than literally like a little bit of junk food with a little bit of Xanax because you just want to lie on your couch and watch someone else save the world.
00:22:49.000I know that's all you want, but that is not true.
00:22:53.000You know, you look at things like from Peaky Blinders to Chernobyl to like the Ken Burns Civil War series.
00:23:01.000Like we're going through this thing where people are realizing like, no, that's not actually true.
00:23:07.000People actually like you, my pal Dax, you know, Shepard, who's got a great radio show, is People like to listen to people who have actual conversations.
00:23:18.000Well, they're also listening – it's a new way of ingesting entertainment.
00:23:24.000Like you're getting it in your car, you're getting it in your ears when you're at the gym, when you're on the subway or a bus or a plane.
00:23:31.000And you're getting these stimulating long-form conversations that maybe people didn't even know they wanted.
00:24:01.000Like we were talking about Hendrix entering into a new dimension of sounds.
00:24:04.000He broke through the membrane of talk radio.
00:24:07.000And what he's doing now is, well, now he's a man in his 60s.
00:24:12.000Who's extremely wealthy and he has some, I'm sure, some regrets as you were talking about the things that he's done in the past and said in the past.
00:24:20.000And he's also like, this is who he is now.
00:24:22.000He's not going to pretend that he just wants to bring strippers in and have them ride the city in every day.
00:24:27.000And when people get upset that he's changed, well, I hope you change too, man.
00:24:41.000When people sort of go, hey, I'm going to be where I am and you've got to deal with it, that's positive, I think.
00:24:53.000Well, it's definitely better than leaning into it and being what people want you to be and then be struggling with that and tortured by that.
00:25:00.000I actually think most of the – most of people who – I think that mostly ends up badly.
00:25:06.000Yeah, I think whenever you don't go with whoever you actually are and whenever you don't acknowledge that whoever you actually are has changed.
00:25:13.000You know, if you're growing and learning and having these epiphanies and these realizations about yourself and where you fit into your own life and how you've interacted with people in your life, you're not making adjustments, and you're only doing it that way because you think that's what people expect of you.
00:25:28.000Well, you're a prisoner to your own first incarnation.
00:26:32.000I tend to take a bit of time between things and also, I don't know, when I, you know, like the first thing I did kind of popped off pretty hot and then everyone's like sending me like,
00:27:08.000And then what's really weird is I did that first – I did a – I played this lawyer.
00:27:12.000I played a young lawyer in the Larry Flint film, right?
00:27:15.000And off of that, I got this distinct vibe of like, hey, the next John Grisham movie is – like the way you were talking in court in that movie, you would kill in this John Grisham thing as the young lawyer or whatever.
00:27:30.000And – And I remember I met – Francis Coppola was going to direct The Rainmaker, this Grisham thing, and I was up for it.
00:27:47.000I was like, I want this – but when I was talking to him about it – And thinking to myself a little bit like, this seems a little square, but it's like Francis Coppola, you know what I mean?
00:28:01.000And when I was talking to him about it, he was like, well, what are you working on?
00:31:05.000And I, so yeah, no, I thought, I tend to get Just the way I felt about American History X, I actually thought American History X was sort of like Othello or Macbeth.
00:31:19.000I thought it was – that's what I said to David.
00:31:22.000He had written this kind of edgy thing with the drug plot in it.
00:31:25.000I was like, I think you strip all that away and you literally just make this about rage destroying a person who's got a lot in him.
00:31:32.000It's like a Shakespearean tragedy but it's just – it's skinheads.
00:31:38.000That really lit David up and that's where we went with that, right?
00:32:05.000I was like if we could do something like that that leans into this guy who thinks he's going for something good that's going to help humanity and he cracks open like the backside of God and takes something out that is not meant to be taken out and now he's cursed.
00:34:19.000And because he had a good relationship with the Japanese consul, And helped, was very generous in helping Japanese people get their papers to come through and in.
00:34:32.000The Japanese consul, I think the story is, who knew Aikido and Jiu Jitsu, offered to, like, teach his sons.
00:35:10.000Everyone throughout jiu-jitsu, it's very, very rare that one figure is universally recognized as being the superior product of jiu-jitsu, and that was Hickson.
00:35:21.000Yeah, if you followed that stuff at all, you kind of heard that breakdown of it.
00:35:27.000I thought a part of the story, I think Hickson told me...
00:35:33.000When we were in Rio, I think what he said to me was that the reason Gracie Jiu Jitsu became its particular derivation and its particular kind of things that allowed Hoyce to do so well was because their father...
00:36:42.000I grew a lot when I was like 17. But I was really interested in Japan and I was interested in martial arts and, you know, James Clavel's Shogun.
00:36:55.000And I took like a karate class and it scared me.
00:36:59.000People, if they were bigger and faster, it was just scary.
00:37:02.000If you were little, it was like, I can't.
00:37:05.000It doesn't matter if I can do these combos or whatever.
00:37:09.000In truth, I'm terrified of anybody bigger than me and I don't feel...
00:37:14.000That this is teaching me anything that I would have the confidence to use to defend myself, right?
00:37:49.000And it kind of started to make me believe that with grappling and locking, which there's a lot of jujitsu in Aikido, and I was sort of like – I was fascinated.
00:38:01.000I started feeling like this makes me feel like I – It's not like kicking someone's ass at all.
00:38:09.000It's just more like I feel more empowered.
00:38:11.000I feel able to handle an authentic situation, which is mentally empowering more than like I want to get into scraps.
00:39:30.000And I was like, find me Hicks and Gracie and ask him if he'll do a scene with me in the movie being the guy who's training Banner to calm himself.
00:39:39.000And he was there, and he did it with us.
00:40:17.000And it details Hickson's journeys to Japan to fight in Japan Valley Tudo, which was around 94, which is right after his brother had won the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
00:41:47.000Yeah, some breathing and something called gymnastica natural, which was like a style of movement that was sort of like vinyasa yoga with all these flowing postures, but also with a bunch of almost like animal movements to it, too.
00:42:02.000And it was a very physically demanding thing, and he became outstanding at that as well.
00:42:09.000But people don't – from the outside, when you start talking about things like jiu-jitsu and ultimate fighting, you think of it as brutal, violent.
00:42:16.000But it's an intellectual pursuit and it's a spiritual pursuit because to be the person that can overcome all of the obstacles, you have to have incredible control of your emotions and your thought processes and your understanding of who you are.
00:42:29.000And that, I think, is one of the things that separated Hickson from everybody.
00:42:50.000It's hard to be aggressive, super aggressive without a little bit of adrenaline pumping and stress and all these things.
00:42:56.000The truth is, like, there's so much of the training – if you're actually training this stuff, what you're training yourself to do is be calm.
00:43:04.000And that's, like, totally counterintuitive because people think, no, you've got to go in there like Rocky and, you know, want to win.
00:43:10.000And it's like, well, in a fighting – in a competition, sure, on some level.
00:43:16.000But really, really, really great people, kind of in any sport, but it's even more counterintuitive in fighting is – Is you need to cultivate calm.
00:43:26.000And the ability to be clinical and think calmly, control your breathing, because you get exhausted if you can't control your breathing.
00:43:35.000And the truth is, is that those are life skills that are actually very...
00:44:34.000To passivism if they refined and Aikido was a refinement of kendo, jiu-jitsu, judo and he basically said I'm going to develop a non-aggressive martial art that has all – it has no attacks and there's an uke in it like for the – But it's only a defensive,
00:44:54.000and it's like that phrase we all hear, redirection of energy, the conversion of negative energy into neutral.
00:45:06.000He was like, you can take the most aggressive energy and you can neutralize it, and you can neutralize it very peacefully, or you can neutralize it with a little more teeth in it, depending on how aggressive the person's being.
00:46:10.000And I think like Jiu-Jitsu, what you're saying is really ultimately like why he was great is he had like the deepest Zen of anybody in the whole thing because he was the calmest.
00:46:21.000And he had like the micro, micro, micro, micro understanding of – Yeah, he had everything.
00:46:53.000But Above the Law, because I was into all that stuff when Above the Law came out, And there was this scene in Above the Law, and he's in an Aikido, you know, gi with the black thing, and he's doing this thing.
00:47:06.000And I was like, oh my god, like, this is so cool.
00:47:10.000Like, when have you ever seen this in a movie?
00:48:49.000Yeah, there was just like the way things are with schools of thought.
00:48:53.000But yeah, he had a certain legit kind of thing.
00:48:57.000And it's really wild because people like Mike Ovitz who was like the power agent – Of all of Hollywood in the 80s, you know, Mike got a black belt training with Seagal.
00:49:05.000Like, he was really serious Aikidoist.
00:50:31.000This takes place in the 50s in New York and it's kind of – it's got a Chinatown, LA Confidential kind of a noir bent to it.
00:50:41.000It's a mystery, a murder mystery of kind of – that leads into some of the stuff that happened in New York in the 50s that is hard to believe because New York was – New York was run by basically a Darth Vader-like figure who was never elected to public office and people thought he was the Parks Commissioner of New York but he was from 1930 to 1968,
00:51:10.000he had uncontested authoritarian power over New York City and New York State and he made every significant decision I think I'm going to go.
00:51:39.000He was responsible for the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn and going to LA. And nobody knows this.
00:51:45.000You think of New York as the great – that's like the great egalitarian melting pot city where democracy works except that it was run by a total autocrat.
00:51:57.000He's largely – it's broadly accepted that no mayor or governor of New York could do a single thing without his say-so from basically about 1930 to about 1968. How is that even possible?
00:52:14.000There's huge – like in one of the big Burns Brothers documentaries about New York, there's a whole – literally almost a whole episode on him.
00:52:22.000There's a great book about him that won the Pulitzer Prize.
00:52:26.000And there's – his name was Robert Moses.
00:52:29.000And he – you know, there's Robert Moses State Beach in New York.
00:52:32.000But literally, people think he was the Parks Commissioner.
00:52:34.000But he was – And he was like Anakin Skywalker.
00:54:20.000LA's original sin is that people made fortunes.
00:54:24.000The valley was just farms and they stole the water from up north and rigged the game and made these gigantic fortunes by irrigating San Fernando Valley.
00:54:35.000You come away with like – you come away with an awareness that like the California story is not exactly what it's cracked up to be, right?
00:54:44.000It's – there's some big crimes underneath it and the people who – and in that movie, it's like, yeah, people ripped everybody off.
00:59:04.000Remember how there's no dialogue at all for like the longest time?
00:59:08.000And I remember I watched it recently over the last couple years and one of the thoughts was, I don't even know if they could do this today.
00:59:14.000If anybody would allow them to make a movie where no one talks for a long time.
00:59:20.000They're just sort of setting the stage of what it means to be a race car driver and what's the atmosphere of the races.
00:59:27.000It's just the idea that you were saying earlier about having this short attention span theater, these movies that are designed for what they believe is a populace of people that don't have the interest in something that's more unique or something that requires thought,
00:59:59.000And these rare examples, like when a guy does break through with something like Do the Right Thing, or a few other examples, why doesn't that stimulate the appetite for more?
01:01:13.000I think people try, but I think that there are some people who really do think Jaws had a big effect on movies because it was like the first true blockbuster,
01:01:34.000I think that what happens more often than not is Adult people get the jobs at the big companies that make the decisions about what to make, right?
01:01:46.000And at a certain point, they sort of age out.
01:01:48.000They start to age out and they don't actually have any idea what the vibe is.
01:01:56.000They don't know what to make for the coming wave of younger people.
01:02:02.000And so these little windows open up now and then where in that era they needed They needed new people.
01:02:12.000They needed like – George Lucas making American Graffiti.
01:02:15.000Nobody thought that movie was going to be a hit.
01:03:38.000The thing about films, it seems to me, it's such a collaborative effort.
01:03:42.000And when you have so many moving pieces and so many people involved that have a say in the decision-making process, it's got to be insanely difficult to get something out that's pure.
01:03:57.000Francis Coppola said that the best thing about making films is that they're collaborative and the worst thing about making films is that they're collaborative.
01:04:09.000He also said it's the last moral totalitarian job in the world, like being a director or something.
01:05:27.000Like, my character goes into the old Penn Station that was torn down in 1963 or whatever.
01:05:34.000And you only pull that off with the most kickass Justice League of collaborators imaginable.
01:05:41.000Like they make you look like you're a visionary or know what you're doing because you get these people with crazy talents of their own.
01:05:51.000And I don't mean just cast, although I had that too in this.
01:05:55.000I mean like some of the very, very, very best people bring their talent to like making that work.
01:06:02.000And so that's like when you say like – your job is more to say I have really talented people.
01:06:10.000I've got to get their frequency wave in line with mine.
01:06:13.000If I can get their frequency wave in line with mine, then it can be my – My idea, my vision, my weird ideas can be in there, but it's executed with the help of people who believe in it and buy into it.
01:07:28.000Basically, Bruce, Alec, Willem, people like that, I practically call them co-financiers on my film because I only got it done because they deferred everything.
01:07:40.000When you write something like this car chase scene through Harlem, I mean, I would imagine the logistics of pulling something like that off, it's got to be insane.
01:07:50.000When you wrote it and you brought it to the people that are the stunt people, the people that coordinate these chase scenes, were they like, oh, fuck?
01:07:59.000People get – people – yes, you know, doing the things is not hard.
01:08:09.000Getting permission to do them in Manhattan is tricky.
01:08:14.000And there are people who look at you like you're dreaming, man.
01:08:18.000Like you're not – And what you do is you go out and scout and you start – you say, look, this is – we can do this here and this here and this isn't hard.
01:08:29.000Then you like find that place where you're like, I want him to do a huge screeching turn onto Frederick Douglass Boulevard because it has a nine-block stretch where there's very few buildings that don't look like they're in the 50s.
01:09:25.000So any car that's actually got to be doing anything, like going fast or making a big turn, you have to have four of the same model that you've painted identically because they're going to break.
01:10:19.000The next movie I'm doing is going to have Tesla P100Ds that go like 0-60 and 2.4.
01:10:26.000Now, when you write this out, how much time is involved in preparation of writing this and then doing all the scouting and then trying to implement this whole...
01:10:37.000It took me a couple of years to write it because I haven't even said...
01:11:28.000But when something bad happens to him and my guy has to step out of the assistant role, he's his operative because he has a great memory.
01:11:36.000He has a photographic memory and some really weird ability because his brain is chaotic and He has certain little gifts that Bruce Willis relies on him for and believes in him.
01:11:52.000But when he has to sort of figure out what happened to his boss and solve this mystery, he kind of has to come out on his own, out of his comfort zone and kind of become a detective.
01:12:03.000And it's like, you know, he's ticking and twitching and shouting and doing things that make it very difficult for him to move in the world.
01:12:56.000But sometimes you just have to, like, just...
01:13:00.000And that's where a bike in New York is really great, like, because you can just sort of float around, float around, float around, mentally mapping...
01:13:44.000And in LA, if I'm on a bike, I would say I regularly look to my right and I look to my left and both people on either side of me are texting.
01:14:16.000If I'm on a motorcycle in LA, I'll look at people...
01:14:19.000They're texting for so long and finally I'll have to like hit the horn or something and look at them.
01:14:24.000I've gotten past like, you know, anger and literally just looked at people, flipped my thing up and gone like, please, like please get off your phone.
01:14:34.000Like you're going to kill somebody and kill yourself.
01:15:21.000I think this is way more dangerous riding than New York.
01:15:26.000That makes sense when you talk about things like the 405 or the one-on-one when people are flying by and passing and changing lanes and the texting, too.
01:15:40.000And half the times you hear about or see bad accidents here, especially if they involve motorcycles or something, it's not like the person screwed...
01:15:50.000The person on the bike didn't screw up.
01:15:51.000Someone went through a red light and just broadsided them or they T-boned them.
01:15:57.000It's like, do you really want to make the huge bet on yourself where what you're riding on is other people's concentration?
01:16:09.000Were you riding when you were living out here?
01:16:12.000I've never – I've always lived in New York.
01:16:14.000So when you've been here, it's only for a few months at a time?
01:17:17.000The thing that pulls you in, I mean, I have lots of, you know, I like to surf, I fly planes, I like, there's a lot of stuff that I think is much, much, much, that's thrilling, that's much safer than riding motorcycles.
01:17:30.000But once you have that skill set, once you can do it, if you have a bike, there are those times in LA and in New York, too, where you take a look at, like, the gridlock and you're just like...
01:18:05.000And what was the process of having this sort of build in your mind to the point where you wanted to write it, direct it, produce it, cast it?
01:18:12.000Honestly, I read the book exactly 20 years ago.
01:18:14.000I read it in the fall of 99 when Fight Club came out.
01:18:21.000That's right around the time I read this novel, Motherless Brooklyn.
01:18:26.000But the novel is about the Tourettec detective who's trying to solve the murder of his only friend basically.
01:19:09.000I could get so into trying to figure that out.
01:19:15.000For reasons that are a little hard to explain, the tone of the book feels like a 50s detective novel, but it's set in the modern world, and I was afraid in a movie that would feel a little bit like the Blues Brothers, like guys in fedoras, but a Prius is floating by, and so you're sort of like, maybe this would just be cooler if we set it in the 50s,
01:19:35.000and I talked to the author about that, and he was super into those movies, and so he said, okay.
01:19:41.000So then – but then the middle period was the period of mashing that up with these sort of stories, the New York Chinatown kind of of it, the deep, dark history of what really went on in New York and that took a long time.
01:19:57.000And then I had it ready in 2012. I was really ready to go and I just couldn't get it to – I couldn't get – Bruce said he was in and that was kind of angry but I couldn't get everyone I wanted together at the same time and I couldn't get the amount of money I needed or that I thought I wanted and I couldn't get a studio to back it.
01:20:20.000Because honestly, number one, I'm not like a green light anything he does kind of an actor.
01:20:29.000It's just – I think that's a different sort of thing.
01:20:36.000But also I was out there saying it's sort of like Rain Man meets L.A. Confidential and people's eyes just kind of cross.
01:20:45.000They're like – Bring us the next one.
01:22:41.000It was rattling around in my head such a long time I felt very discouraged about it at times because I was kind of like, you know, I've done a few okay things.
01:22:51.000Like I've done some stuff that was weird and that people didn't understand and it's come together pretty great, you know what I mean?
01:23:00.000And you sort of go, God, I never expect anybody to give me money.
01:23:39.000I was more, if I'd tried to do it 20 years ago, I couldn't, I didn't have the chops to do some of the things, like working with Spike Lee and Alejandro and Yuridu and people like that really, like, it upped my sense of how to do,
01:23:55.000I learned a lot about how to do a big thing without all the money in the world.
01:24:00.000Now, this is released nationwide, worldwide, like when?
01:24:39.000Like, I can say that people who are seeing it are very, very, very into it and very bought in because it is one of those, like, it's a big meal, but it's a really, like, it's a really rich,
01:24:55.000good meal, and it has amazing, amazing performances.
01:24:58.000I don't think Alec Baldwin has ever been better in a movie.
01:25:16.000I think it's kind of one of those things that it's worth going to the theater to see, but I guarantee you it's more worth your time than another Terminator movie.